This is something I made sure to rescue from the old site: after the first time I posted the 1996 sequence with Arlo’s father, somebody asked me to re-post it every year.
Unfortunately most of your comments are gone, but the 47 you posted in 2018 and 2019 are below.
[Note for 2022 — Reposting to continue Bill’s tradition. 2020 and 2021 comments also preserved.]
Several years ago, Bill commented upon the unusual frequency of “Grim Reaper” comics, and he even held an informal submission contest to prove his point.
For this reason, I suggested scheduling the following comic collection for today, the second anniversary of Bill’s extremely untimely passing, in memory of a dear friend whom we all miss terribly, and who (I believe) would have understood this rather unorthodox memorial presentation in the humorous and good-natured fashion in which it is sincerely intended.
It’s simply a real shame that Bill could not have had the chance to read and comment upon these comics with us all.
Michael Kilby
This Strange Brew was contributed by Andréa, originally as an Oy:
Leigh Rubin keeps on returning to the Grim Reaper theme:
“Here’s an apocryphal story that I figure prominently in.”A CIDUer received this in some email without source info, and passed it along. The artist seems to be Mike Gruhn, who posts cartoons to Instagram and here-and-there; and has his own site, called WebDonuts. He had a feature called Caption Challenge or Caption Contest, which seems to end in 2015. A note on the WebDonuts site from 2019 indicates that Instagram would be the place to look for his current material.
The mirror is sketched oddly and had me thinking for a second it was a cleaver! But thankfully, no!
CIDU Bill had saved this one to an unused draft dated 2019/08/17 and called “Strange Family”, as a CIDU:
From chemgal, who indicates that she *did* get it (tho it took a moment). But she calls it CBWU and explains “It took me a moment to get [Friday’s] Arlo and Janis. Given it’s a cat comic, I’m pretty sure that Bill would not have understood it.”
However, the premise is not quite up-to-date. Nowadays, it would be more likely an email.